Because he was ceo of a company in a critical position to define the future of economy. Currently the tech field is the biggest and most influential of all economic fields. And by tech here we talk about digital world. There’s absolutely no comparable sector at the moment for importance, not even pharma.

It literally defines the modern economy. In the field, openai is an incredibly important company for future relative success and power of big tech companies.

This is why it is so important for world economy

In the easiest example of a neuron in a artificial neural network, you take an image, you multiply every pixel by some weight, and you apply a very simple non linear transformation at the end. Any transformation is fine, but usually they are pretty trivial. Then you mix and match these neurons to create a neural network. The more complex the task, the more additional operations are added.

In our brain, a neuron binds some neurotransmitters that trigger a electrical signal, this electrical signal is modulated and finally triggers the release of a certain quantity of certain neurotransmitters on the other extreme of the neuron. Detailed, quantitative mechanisms are still not known. These neurons are put together in an extremely complex neural network, details of which are still unknown.

Artificial neural network started as an extremely coarse simulation of real neural networks. Just toy models to explain the concept. Since then, they diverged, evolving in a direction completely unrelated to real neural network, becoming their own thing.

No, what you describe is a basic decision tree. Let’s say the simplest possible ML algorithm, but it is not used as is in practice anywhere. Usually you find “forests” of more complex trees, and they cannot be used for generation, but are very powerful for labeling or regression (eli5 predict some number).

Generative models are based on multiple transformations of images or sentences in extremely complex, nested chains of vector functions, that can extract relevant information (such as concepts, conceptual similarities, and so on).

In practice (eli5), input is transformed in a vector and passed to a complex chain of vector multiplications and simple mathematical transformations until you get an output that in the vast majority of cases is original, i.e. not present in the training data. Non original outputs are possible in case of few “issues” in the training dataset or training process (unless explicitly asked).

In our brain there are no if/else, but electrical signals modulated and transformed, which is conceptually more similar to the generative models than to a decision tree.

In practice however our brain works very differently than generative models

There is not a single if/else in a neural network. You are confusing it with decision trees that are used for classification

“Life is long, I’ll have plenty of time to do it in the future”. Spoiler: life is short

Have you thought asking support from a counselor? It might help to cope

You are most probably wrong. How old are you?

Time really cures such feelings. In 20 years you’ll watch back to these events with a very different perspective

What? The reason is that academia does not rewards competency and innovative research. It rewards ability to gather funds, and to streamline paper production. Professors nowadays are often “technically” average, but extremely good startup ceos

We, as society, have become dumb and mean… It’s a pity

If you read the article you find out. Unfortunately this kind of stories are the norm of modern academia

All best old-school emeritus professors I met in my life were absolutely certain they wouldn’t have had a career in modern academia.

This story doesn’t surprise anyone unfortunately

It targets router firmwares though… These bot farms do not usually target real gnu/Linux os, because it is easier and more effective to attack router firmwares that are not well configured by producers and telcoms, and are practically never upgraded.

Therefore they are not a real threat for standard mint or popOS user… Let alone gentoo users

Edit. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirai_(malware)

I use python professionaly. Never seen a real successful supply chain attack on libraries used by “normal” people. There was recently a supply chain attack to pytorch, that I remember, but it was solved within few hours.

It is not a real risk for non developers. It is a risk, but veeery low, miles lower than pdf.exe.

Just check this stat for ransomwares taken as an example of viruses: https://www.statista.com/statistics/701020/major-operating-systems-targeted-by-ransomware/

Windows server is ~20% of server market. Still it is there second, with in practice no GNU/linux (80% of server market). This is why people do not really worry much, the risk exists, but it is minimal for well configured system compared to competition, even where competitors are a niche and Linux machines are the main target.

On windows, an antivirus is not a bad idea… On Linux, a firewall and basic care are usually sufficient

I agree with you, but, it is also true that the overwhelming majority of ransomwares affect windows https://www.statista.com/statistics/701020/major-operating-systems-targeted-by-ransomware/

Linux is not a significant target despite being so diffused

Edit. For those downvoting, windows server is ~20% of the server market and it is second in that stat. GNU/Linux distros such as rhel, debian and so on are almost 80% of server market and still there are no sufficient attacks reported to end up in that stat

Ok, than the experiment you are doing is just to check how many attacks you can get over a certain time… It is not really representative of a common use case. And again, this is not a virus. It is a successful attack from a bot on a purposely misconfigured service exposed to the internet. An antivirus is not needed. What is needed is basic configuration. An antivirus cannot help there

And disable password authentication as first step

Does the attack succeed? Never happened to me. You see bot trying, but really never seen succeeding irl. How is it configured?

Do you have also a rdp honeypot by chance? Do you see different rates of attack? Honestly curious.

I don’t have any windows licenses around, otherwise, it would have been an interesting test

Not at all. You leave a ssh port open, you don’t necessarily get a virus. Try it. Set up a raspberry pi, install ssh and leave the port open in your firewall. It is much less risky than exposing rdp (the most comparable windows protocol) on windows for instance.

It is a security risk, but absolutely not comparable of installing pdf.exe. Not even in the same league of risk.

As said, try it now and tell me how it goes.

There is a lot of misinformation around security on Linux

I have been using linux for almost 2 decades, never seen a virus. And I never heard of a colleague or friend who got one on Linux. That’s why no one has ever installed an antivirus, because, till now, the risk has been practically zero.

On windows, on the other hand, I saw so many viruses on friends and relatives computers…

People install antiviruses depending on the experience.

To be fair, we all know on Linux viruses exist, but is objectively pretty difficult to get one. It is not worth installing an antivirus if one doesn’t actively install garbage from untrusted sources

I did a bit in big pharma… But it was 90% paper work unfortunately.

Probably a smaller firm would have been better, but I was tired of lack of job security and I went for safe bets.

I am now in fintech. We still struggle with corporate mindset, particularly IT, we are highly regulated as pharma, but at least we are not stuck in the 90s as I was when working with SAS in pharma. And salaries are slightly higher.

At the end you don’t need much to be successful outside academia. In academia it is literally a scammy lottery. Outside, you just need to be a bit pro active. Standards are pretty low. The biggest difficult is to convince hr that you are good fit without industry experience. HR people unfortunately do not think as reasonable beings. They wouldn’t do hr if they were reasonable. But once you manage to start, even the most “complex” job in industry is pretty trivial, you’ll be more than enough doing the bare minimum. If you put a bit of effort (even not much), you’ll be very successful